Having a great relationship with yourself is a game changer. How you talk to yourself,
and maybe even more importantly, how you feel about yourself is going to have a direct impact
on your relationships with others, the confidence that you have in going after your goals,
and just the way in which you move through the world. So I have come such a long way
myself in healing the relationship with myself, and this is what I help women with today in the
videos that I share here on my channel and in my private coaching practice, and my group coaching
programs. And today I want to share with you three self-love practices that you can implement
immediately so that you can begin to heal that relationship with yourself so you can live boldly
and with confidence. So if you're excited to learn about these practices, then hit the like button.
And if you want to go deeper, I've created a free guided self-love meditation,
and you can grab that from the link below in the description. And this has really been created to
support you to connect to your beautiful heart and to connect to your worthiness. So if this
is something that you want to have more of, then go and grab that free meditation from
the link in the description. Alrighty, let's get into the three self-love practices. And
practice number one is to redefine what self-love and self care means to you. If
you've been following me for any amount of time, you'll know that I do not equate self-care or
self-love to bubble baths and facials. They're really great and they can be very relaxing,
but those things don't do anything to move us closer towards our goals. They are a pampering
aspect of self care and self-love, but that's not truly what self-love is.
So something that almost all the women that I speak to in my coaching practice struggle with,
something that most of them mention at some point is how guilty they feel about taking time
for themselves and about practising self care. This is a real thing, this guilt about taking
care of ourselves. And I believe it has so much to do about how we've been socialised as women.
It has really been imprinted into us that we need to take care of everyone else around us. We need
to put their needs ahead of ours. And if we don't do that, it makes us selfish. So if you're going
to focus on yourself, you're going to focus on your needs, it's going to make you selfish. And
even if that is never directly stated, that is so much implied to take care of everyone
else first and then whatever resources or energy it is that we have left over this then what we
can use for our own wellbeing. We also tend to get fed the idea that self care
is an external action that you place upon yourself. So it's products that you buy,
it's activities that you do, it's things that you spend money on so that you can look better
or create a better impression. And I think this is why it is so crucial for us to create our
own definition of what self care is. To me, self care has to do with your physical, your mental,
your emotional, and your energetic or spiritual wellbeing. And it has the purpose of nourishing
you on these levels so that you can feel whole, grounded, well resourced and resilient. Our true
inner confidence really asks us to use our own truth and our own wisdom as a yard stick,
right, to use that as our guiding principle. So we want to disconnect and unhook ourselves from the
social view of what it means, the socialised conditioned view of what it means to love
yourself, to practice self care, and to take care of yourself on a level that
allows you to then be resourced enough to take care of everyone around you.
So I invite you to start thinking of self care as a non-negotiable
and something that doesn't necessarily cost money. The second self care practice is to love on your
triggers. Typically, you are not really being triggered by what's happening in the here and now.
This is a nervous system response because what is happening in the here and now is a reminder
of some traumatic or very big impactful experience that happened in your past. So
something interesting, which I've been noticing on the psychology bumper stickers and the, and
the memes, is that there is a move and a desire and the idea that our nervous systems should be
constantly regulated and non-responsive and we should be non-responsive. We should be able to
become an observer of our experience and remove ourselves from that emotional reactivity so that
we can from a place of distance, observe and then make decisions from this place.
A challenge that I have with that is that it can so easily turn into another shame fest. We
don't want to be in a nervous system or have a nervous system that's constantly overactivated.
And we also don't want a nervous system that doesn't get activated at all. As humans,
it's not possible for us. Our nervous system has the important job of keeping us safe. It
has the important job of getting activated. But if you believe what we see out on social media,
it's easy for us to think that whenever I have a trigger, whenever I have an emotional response,
it means that there's something wrong. And so that there's something that needs to be fixed. Instead,
what I want to invite you to do is to use your emotional triggers as a starting point for
personal healing. So when we are being triggered in this moment in the here and now, this is an
opportunity and a place for us to start healing. And in my own life and also in the work that I do
with my clients, one of the primary areas that I focus on when it comes to working with our nervous
system, working with our emotional reactivity is to do some inner child work to develop
and nurture the relationship with your inner child, your inner girl. In my experience, working
with your inner girl and really making her feel safe, making her feel heard, understood, and seen,
it's a foundational practice, a foundational piece of the puzzle in terms of healing the relationship
with yourself and really loving on yourself. If your inner girl feels safe to receive that love,
I see that it opens you to allowing more intimacy on all levels of your life into your experience.
And then the final self-love practice is to connect into your body. So often when we are
caught up in this dialogue of feeling guilty or we are in a shame storm of wanting to put our
own needs first and feeling resentful because we are feeling so exhausted, there's a lot of mental
activity that happens. And not only that, as we go around in modern world, in our, in our jobs,
and even at home taking care of our family, we spend a lot of time in our minds. We spend a lot
of energy in this area. And what I see happens is we disconnect largely from the data that our body
has available to us. And if you're spending so much time in your mind, it's easy to get
stuck in the story of how you should be better, how things should be different, how you should
try harder, how there's something wrong with you and you need to fix it. As our thoughts create our
feelings, I see this as a loop. Our thoughts create our feelings and our emotions, but our
emotions and feelings in our body also give us thoughts about that. So the one is not exclusive
to the other, but as we develop these thoughts about our worthiness and how
good or how bad we are faring in something, this creates an emotional response in the body,
a somatic response in the body. And often because this is very uncomfortable,
and if you are a sensitive person, I feel that we are particularly prone to, feeling and noticing
these uncomfortable sensations in the body. And so many of us, we've never really been taught to
go into the experience of that. What we tend to do is we take the feeling and we pull it into the
mind and we start analysing and processing and trying to understand what this feeling means.
So this then becomes a cycle, a continuous cycle of we 're continuing to pull our energy into our
minds, into our minds and cutting ourselves off from the neck and this beautiful body of wisdom
and information that is available to us. When you have the practice of connecting into the body, not
only processing whatever it is that you're feeling on a mind level, but really working with the
somatic experience and with your inner world, with that inner felt sense, when we do that, it allows
us to actually go beneath the surface and to get into the real truth. So not the beliefs that we
have been conditioned with and not the beliefs that we have created ourselves through imprinting,
but really then deeper and more empowered beliefs that are not coloured in by these conditionings.
And this of course, is a practice. The practice is first to really learn the skill of dropping into
the body and not to get sucked into the temptation of getting into the story about something,
but really staying with whatever the sensations and the emotions and the feelings in the body. An
embodiment practice that I teach my clients, and it's a practice that I do myself regularly, is
called deep flow. And it really is the practice of feeling what your thoughts and your experiences,
the response that it gives in your body, and then moving closer towards those feelings and
sensations. The intention behind doing such an embodiment practice is not to solve or fix
whatever undesirable or uncomfortable feelings you are experiencing, but it's really to get to
that truth, that wisdom of your body that is not coloured in by the overlying beliefs that
we've been imprinted with and that we've created ourself through our lived experiences. Another
embodiment practice that I really love and that I encourage all my clients to do is to take up
walking. I've spoken about that so much on my channel. As sensitive woman, we do so well when
we connect with nature, when we can go for a walk in nature, it just really helps soothe our nervous
system. It helps bring us down a little bit. So that's a very powerful practice. You can also use
walking as a co-creative practice, and this is really where at the start of your walk, you set
the intention to gain a deeper awareness around something or to have an insight around something
or a resolution or an answer towards something. And as you are walking and you allow yourself to
relax, allow that nervous system again to relax, you'll often find that there is some shift or some
new realisation or insight that drops in. And then the final practice that I really love is
to dance. And this is a little bit different from the deep flow practice that I teach where we don't
use the external sounds like music or rhythm to move us, but we are really following the
rhythm and the information from our internal world to inform our movements. With dancing,
we are really allowing the music to move your body. The faster the music or the slower the music
will really inform the pace and the speed at which you move. We can also use the music to create
emotions and feelings. So dancing can be a really powerful self-love practice. The free download
that I've created for you is also a practice that's going to help you connect into your body.
So make sure that you grab that from the link in the description below, and it's really going
support you to connect to your truth and to your worthiness. If you enjoyed this video,
please let me know by giving it a thumbs up and also subscribe. If you haven't yet joined
our community, I'd love to have you on board. If there are any other themes or topics that you'd
love me to make videos about, you can let me know about that in the comments below and also
share with me how this video landed with you and any insights or takeaways that you might
have. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.